Ben’s Five Keys to Creating a Successful Side Project

I enjoyed this article by Ben Halpern, plus all the associated discussion.  I always find myself trying to hold on to a project that just sort of slips away as my passions change and new work crops up, both personal and professional.  You can dig around in this blog to find examples where I couldn't stick to my ideas for a Unity app and more (where I drifted away from geocaching for instance, although you can't quite grasp how much I shifted toward playing Ingress).

My favorite advice is constraints.  I've often found that to be the best way to keep myself engaged.  Knowing exactly who's involved (just me?), and a firm, but flexible, deadline (yep, both), and what I'm willing to spend personally, and what my expectations are...and they better be tight, manageable, and focused.  As soon as the constraints are loosened and I think "maybe this is something that should be bigger" it goes all cattywampus and drifts away.  I was impressed at Minndemo 25 with the devs who had spent three years working on a pet project.  That's amazing focus, particularly as they have working software to demo after that time for a crowd of 600+  Seems like a good goal - demo at Minnedemo 28 for instance - but that's a lot of pressure.

https://dev.to/ben/bens-five-keys-to-creating-a-successful-side-project

Minnedemo 25

I went to Minndemo with Erik the Hairy Swede last week.  There was a good selection of presentations packed into about an hour.  Damn is that event ever busy now.  Despite the 600+ people crowded into The Minneapolis Depot, I still managed to bump into Jen the contractor placement rep I've known for a long time.  She switched firms recently, so it was nice to bump into her. I preferred her understanding of my contractor needs over her replacement.

TroutSpotr was pretty wild.  It was a pet project to overlay public lands (in Minnesota), roads, and streams, so you could pinpoint where bridges where and where public land access was from the bridge so you could find new places to fish for trout.  He used QGIS and he certainly built something it looks like the DNR might buy off him.  Very funny presentation.

Player's Health was also pretty exceptional.  The developer was trying to create a space parents owned where they could log specific health data for kids in sports so that it could be shared with teams/coaches they invited in.  It would then serve as a place for coaches to capture injuries and receive doctor signoff and then future coaches could see a history of injuries for the purposes of knowing what to watch for.  Reminded me a bit of Concourse that I worked on for my company where lawyers invited other lawyers and individuals into their spaces/matters to share docs and info, but with more concrete form-based interfaces built around aspects of it like injury logging.

Talkative Chef was also interesting - hands free recipe recitation using open source text to voice in the browser.  Clever idea if Alexa/et al don't parallel develop the idea.

Facebook Data Extension

My browser of preference is Chrome, so this extension caught my eye.  I'm not sure what I could do with the information, but it seems interesting to track it even if they're using alternate algorithms and it's PIT (point in time) of install, not retroactive.  So there's no way to really track what you've already told them.  And there's code!  For some reason the idea that there's something particularly useful that could be done with the fact I can get to the source code is bouncing around in my head.  And let's not say that the useful idea is installing a stealth version on corporate computers to track overall corporate culture tendencies (you can obviously track time on Facebook via the corporate logs).  I can see a good and a bad path having that data - start to push your culture toward a new culture (top down "I want this") or recognize the corporate culture you attract and double down.  Then again - you'd have to have a separate (or modified) add-in to track other social media platforms.

I work with a lot of lawyers and they're big on capturing billable data.  I wonder at what point someone decides "we should capture everything" to examine potential for billable work through other services as well as innate biases in lawfirm partners by examining total web activity.  They often want to capture email and text data (although text data is notoriously insecure), so web activity isn't such a big hop.

• http://www.dailydot.com/debug/chrome-extension-facebook-data-tracking/
• https://github.com/d4t4x/

Minndemo 23

I went to Minnedemo (#23) downtown on July 14.  It was at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis.  I wasn't so sure I wanted to go because it was closing in on RAGBRAI, but I finally decided I enjoyed the presentations enough I'd make it work.

Presentations included Toursler, which is a cool use of virtual Google-map style functionality to allow tours of high end houses synced to floor plans.  The dev presenting is obviously into the tech as he was already playing around with VR and demo-ed how they'd used a bit of machine intelligence training to get the computer to identify rooms by aspects of the photos (toilet = bathroom) so they could eliminate a lot of the manual tagging. Gave me some ideas I need to explore.

I found Townsourced less interesting.  The point of a local board, such as you find at your coffee shop, would seem to be that it's local.  By allowing individuals to cross post to multiple community boards, that breaks the metaphor (in my opinion).

Genovest is a stock analysis (but not purchasing) tool.  I think the crux of it is visualization meets investing.  There's a lot of math under it as well, but the output seems to give you visualizations you can use to investigate.  This got me to wondering whether there are investment tools/games for kids.  There does appear to be an official app - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-market-game/id702878174?ls=1&mt=8 - although I haven't used it so I don't know whether it does some of the same visualization tech that's part of the newer app experience.

HabitAware is AMAZING.  You can smell the clever idea w/o significant complexity in their application.  They've taught a bracelet to record gestures.  Then, when you repeat that gesture, the bracelet will give you a warning.  Don't like a particular way you gesticulate, you'll get warnings.  More importantly: nail biting, skin picking, hair pulling.  The inventor created it to help his wife who had constantly removed her eyebrows via plucking.  Now she has eyebrows.  

DiviUp - you buy a coupon/deal and you get savings, a charity gets a cut, and the business gets a little more business.  Groupon with a conscience.  It's a good idea, but those sorts of coupon/rebate/deal apps wear me out.

Kinetic Data.  Well...if you understand this diagram you get it.  It simplifies a lot of backend processes with an easy UI.  We considered variations on the same process for some contract handling work I reviewed.  Their reference to Salesforce and LDAP makes this very much a similar architecture.

And the best...Chicken Scoop AI.  These two came out on stage and gave a presentation on training cameras to identify chickens and present charts/data/visualizations on their activity for purposes of tracking the chickens' behavior, eggs, etc.  Very interesting where they pointed to a chicken that was probably dead (yes sad, but interesting from a data tracking perspective).  Here's a slide that gives you a small sense of their humor.

Random Numbers

Interesting article on new random number generation methods.  Doesn't sound like it will be making it into my C# code anytime soon.  Reminds me of the interview question we setup using one of the shared online coding environments where the dev I was working with - who wasn't used to .NET (although this goes back to COM) did a for loop to generate random numbers and got the same number for each iteration of the loop when he ran the code.  Took an old dev like me to point out that depending on the algorithm, MS usually resorts to some time-based seed, so if your loop is too fast, you'll just get the same number.  You can put in a wait or call one of the reset/reseed functions (or pass in a seed) to "force" the randomness.  MS says it themselves, they use a "time-dependent seed value" and their algorithm is pseudo-random (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.random(v=vs.110).aspx).

But back to some true randomness at http://phys.org/news/2016-06-algorithm-random.html - I think the idea that your randomness might lose its randomness because the other systems it relies on for randomness aren't truly random is interesting. I wonder if, at the heart of the matter, that means that all systems are crackable if you can understand the state of the objects that went into the end system.  That is, it's all obfuscation until you obfuscate to the point that the variables reach infinity.

"How do you know for sure that the measurement devices used to measure the physical system don't have some underlying predictability due to the way they were constructed? To overcome this problem, scientists have developed strict requirements on the devices, but these "device-independent" protocols are so strict that they are very slow at generating large amounts of random numbers."

I also think it's interesting that there is during (dynamic?) and post (static?) randomization, with the latter being computationally heavy and more akin to certification of randomization.  You have to wonder if some day someone with enough horsepower will discover that all the GUIDs generated by current systems aren't random and are discoverable and we'll be forced into a Year-2000 like situation where we have to recompute system ids and update them (and therefore have to update all the relationships - nasty).

Unity Bug #2 - That was Fast (and funny)

Thought I'd be smart and fix the increasing difficulty Vector3 issue by just making the velocity of the asteroids faster and faster based on the wave count.  So I exposed the wave count on the Game Controller and accessed it via the move script where asteroids keep set their velocity based on a public property.

I forgot to account for my wave array being 0 based.  I failed to account for the fact that my shots and asteroids were tied to the same velocity/move script, meaning my bolts go faster as the asteroids go faster.  Perhaps not a bad thing, although strange.  And my ship's movement isn't tied to the same movement script, so it doesn't get faster as the rocks start to shoot down the screen at breakneck speed.

Unity3d - the Asteroids

I've made it as far as adding the asteroids on a wave basis and allowing for explosions between the shots and the rocks and the rocks and the ship.

I'm also reading Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns, which make sense in the context of the mesh and transforms I'm using, but is much more about traditional software patterns.  Still, a very good read.

Minnedemo 22

I went to Minnedemo 22 last night at the Depot in downtown Minneapolis.  I tried to have dinner at Zen Box beforehand, but I was looking for food prior to 5:00 p.m., so it was a no go.  I ended up over at the Crooked Pint eating a peanut butter juicy lucy.  Good.  But not as good as the Blue Door (Longfellow) which, I have to say, is my favorite (and Eryn likes their wings; and it's close to guitar lessons) after Chetek, WI.  But that just might be sentiment speaking.

I will admit, I didn't stay for the whole thing.  I got downtown too early, so I was getting squirrely after a few presentations.  I watched Who's Driving, an app for coordinating car pools if you have kids in extracurricular events.  My sentiment was I'm really happy I never have to carpool and even consider using that app. I see the happy people on the app website and think, "They're so happy they're f***ing over their friends."

I watched Twistjam, which involved an Asian guitar player (does his race matter?) sitting on stage not really playing guitar for 7 minutes.  The app is cool, but Mike and Eryn told me you have to enter your own cords which is a pain in the ***.  They're playing with it to see what the limitations are.  It's a Rock Band style guitar-learning app.

Litejot.com, notable for being presented by a U of MN student.  Dude.  Come work for me.

Homi, which I shared with Charlotte because it was created by a Carleton econ alum.  She helped me interview an intern last week and right afterwards I talked to a Carleton intern candidate.  Most of the Carleton folks I've talked to are above average.  Which is strange for a college known for liberal arts skills.  But I've found a good prof or two with real world experience makes all the difference in the world.

And YouAreHear.org.  Well.  I played with that all the way to Izzy's where I had a bourbon izzy on a scoop of Zin chocolate ice cream.  The presenter was particularly funny and joked that he was the only person not to use the word monetized.  More of an art project than anything else.  But fun if you're wandering around downtown and paying enough attention that you're pretty sure you won't get mugged.

Vidcomet and Aurelius.  You're on your own.  Although Aurelius sounds particularly interesting to me as a manager, so I'll be checking it out.

Why We Killed Off Code Reviews

An interesting article at http://eatcodeplay.com/why-we-killed-off-code-reviews/

 I wasn't familiar with the 200 lines of code per hour study they cite from the IEEE.: http://www.pitt.edu/~ckemerer/PSP_Data.pdf.

That sounds excruciatingly slow, although not out of reason. There have been days in my history where I wrote thousands of lines of code. Sitting down for 8-10 hours of line-by-line would have been excruciating (and some of that code was still running as of this year, so I know it survived my developer demise). It's interesting to see the issue of context switching infesting everything, even what's considered a best practice.

 "You push a pull request. Someone else has to stop what they’re doing to review it. Meanwhile, you’ve started the next feature. If the reviewer has questions, you’re pulled back into that conversation with possible changes to make after the fact."

Cultures of Code

"What’s the difference between computer science, computational science, and software development..."

 A good article in American Scientist about different cultures of coding. When i started (and I should confess, I'm a History/English/Writing major) in AeroE, I would say RPI was training me more as a computational scientist: modeling data and computational problems. Where I landed roughly ten years later was definitely the software development culture. Every now and then I run into a developer who tells me a variation of the following statement below - that we get lots of good software developers who know the languages, but that don't know their "basics". Admittedly, in my experience, we hire for the former, not the latter. Perhaps in part because they create copious amounts of business-requested code (features), even if it's not based entirely in the fundamentals. It's a bit of a conundrum and we seem to juggle it a bit by having a separate R&D group as well as some groups that balance on that line between software development and computational science and even computer science that can focus on the underlying efficiency and methodology rather than delivering external user features.

 "Programmers today are intensely partisan in their choices of programming languages, yet interest in the underlying principles seems to have waned. Two years ago I attended a lunch-table talk by a young graduate student who had turned away from humanities and business studies to take up a new life designing software. She had fallen in love with coding, and she spoke eloquently of its attractions and rewards. But she also took a swipe at the traditional computer science curriculum. “No one cares much about LR(1) parsers anymore,” she said, referring to one of the classic tools of language processing. The remark saddened me because the theory of parsing is a thing of beauty. At the very least it is a historical landmark that no one should pass by without stopping to read the plaque. But, as Edith Wharton wrote, “Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.”"

Why A Job in Programming is Absolute Hell

Every now and then every developer needs to break down and rant about some of the ridiculous of their job.  This is a particularly good example, if only for the phrase, "Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat."

http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-676-Why+a+

Useful Documentation

I had a suspicion this would be the answer to the Selenium error message in my logs, but I felt I needed to validate it anyway.  I think under Common Solutions it should say, "Make sure the element is present.  Idiot."  That would help a lot.

Recursion!

Recursion at work!

Null

This sort of thing makes me feel better about stupid mistakes in my own software.  I still hate it, but it's nice to know other apps have issues that our own testing catches.  Says we're doing something right.

Always Multiply Your Estimates by π

A very clever article on software estimation, "Always Multiply Your Estimates by π" at #AltDevBlog.

"Now some may question my mathematical rigour, and even dispute what I believe to be the incontrovertible conclusion. People may claim that the correct multiplier is not in fact π — but that it is rather 2, or √2, or e, or the golden ratio φ. I am, however, aware of no one who claims the multiplier is less than one."

OCR

I had a customer who wanted to use OneNote to OCR their image-based document and was wondering if our system would find it in a search.  The primary issue with an OCR-ed image in OneNote is that it stuffs the OCR-ed text under the image so it’s not directly visible, which means we won’t index it for searching.  However, if we did, this is OneNote’s translation of a fairly straight-forward image of a page of text. I reproduced something similar a second time using a scrape of my desktop, so I know it's not a single document, but a general OneNote behavior.  Almost better than Lorem Ipsum.

I do think jurisclirtion should be a word.  And otuplam! sounds very threatening.  Fcdkgano’r?  Otuplam!

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[no audio]

I was watching an episode of Doctor Who today while riding my bicycling trainer.  When I do that, I tend to leave the subtitles on, just so I don't miss something if I'm busy messing with the wireless headphones because of sweat. At one point, Donna and the Doctor are communicating through windows and the subtitles state [no audio].  I've seen it before where the subtitles tell me what music is playing or what sound has just happened, but [no audio] was new.  It didn't occur to me that you might want to let someone who couldn't hear know if it looked like someone was talking when they really weren't.

I think sometimes my product has similar issues.  Several times recently I've found myself asking a designer, "How do you cancel?"  Or, "How do you undo that action?"  The answer has been, "There's no need.  They can check in preferences." or "They won't really do that in the first place, even though we let them."  Ugh. As a user, I always want the ability to say, "No thank you, not right now."  And, even better, "Not right now, and quit asking me; I'm sick of pushing buttons."  If you're doing something for me that I can't see, such that it's buried in a preferences menu somewhere, it's even more imperative you give me a way to bypass it without digging around the site map.  [No audio] reminded me of those recent issues because you should always be thinking about the cases where you account for something someone may expect, but which doesn't happen and all those other use cases that just don't seem obvious because you want to provide a specific piece of functionality and your ego is potentially tied up in how users will use it.

Books - Recommendations from Various Folks

A lot of my time has been spent lately thinking about what I want to read next.  I dare say I spend more time worrying about what I want to read than actually reading.  One of the developers I work with solved part of the problem by writing his own book and publishing it on Amazon.  So I'm reading Erik Hyrkas' Tritium Gambit.  Unfortunately, it's a damn quick read and after a (week) day I'm already half way through it.  I'm enjoying it so far. Sort of Men In Black, but with aliens instead of humans, set in Minnesota.  I hear it may be free for your Kindle on Amazon this weekend.  $0.00 is a pretty good deal.


And I also read the Leviathan series - Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath - by Scott Westerfeld.  Mean Mr. Mustard recommended it.  Young adult, but well worth the read.  Puts The Hunger Games to shame in my opinion.  Not nearly so whiny.  And that's from someone with a predilection for dystopic literature (so I'd trend toward The Hunger Games).  It's a steampunk alt history novel about WWI being fought between Darwinists, who manipulate life, and Clankers, who manipulate machines.  The lines follow the political lines of WWI (Britain/Russia = Darwinists, Germany/Austria = Clankers, US/Japan = amalgam), but it's much more complicated than that.  He does a great job of interspersing actual history with his steampunk vision.  I've been harassing Eryn and my wife to read it with assurances that they'll love it.

I read this article, about what book introduced various authors to science fiction and fantasy.  I'm interested to read The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet and Planetoid, The Riddle-Master of Hed, and The World of Tiers.  I apologize with characteristic Minnesota niceness to Galen Dara, but no one should consider their intro to sci fi to be Anne McCaffrey and The Wheel of Time.

I think this article on alternative families in fantasy and science fiction only told me what not to read.

Which brings me to the icing on the cake.  David Brin wrote a damn splendid write up of his favorite sci fi books.  In categories.  Huxley.  Banks.  Vinge.  Heinlein.  Bear.  Asimov.  Niven.  Sheffield.  Wilson. Gaiman.  Mieville. Haldeman. Dick.  Westerfeld!  This is a f*ing fine list.  The only immediate book that jumps to mind that I disagree with is Harry Turtledove's Great War Series.  And to be honest, I don't know that it's a bad series.  I only know I hated the first book of the World War series so much it still makes me angry.  Mean Mr. Mustard can attest to that as I brought it up outside his workplace.  The only book that ever made me angrier was a Hammer's Slammers book by David Drake a friend game me where the protagonist was rewarded for trying to rape a lesbian by having sex with her and her partner in the end for saving their lives. Ick.  Anyway - Brin's list.  Print it.  Read all of them.  It's the best list I've ever seen.

And finally, something for the not so scifi/fantasy inclined.  Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free From the Annual Performance Trap by Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser.  It comes to late for this year's review process, and I haven't read it yet, but it came highly recommended by the speakers at the Code Freeze Conference and it's on my Kindle (iPad).

And 30 Books Everyone in Software Business Should Read (and why).  This is actually a very good list as far as software development lists go.  Spolsky's books were important to me, and I still quote them and explain to people how the ideas in his books explain much of the software we work with every day at my workplace.  I've read a number of the others on this list and I'm currently reading the Pragmatic Programmer.  While developer books can quickly show their age, if you get past worrying about the specifics and focus on the generalities of what never changes, you gain some valuable insight.

• One more: 7 Literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books You Must Read.
• 102 Essential Sci Fi Books for Your Kindle (Wired)
• A Dozen of the Best from 2011 (Locus)

Chipotle Reunion

This happened a few weeks ago, but I wanted to a.) get it on my blog and b.) put something on top of the naughty librarian so it's not the latest post for anyone who goes directly to my blog.

My old development and business team, plus some folks who were on the team (business side) after I left, plus some adoptees (Mean Mr. Mustard).  This was our best turnout at the local Chipotle (which opened while most of us were on the project) in quite some time.  Sandy, who was my lead, is holding the camera and, left to right: me (looking sort of Sling Blade or Rainman), Dawn, Christy Twofist, Aaron (whose face is fuzzy if you zoom in - it's creepy, like what you'd expect the truth to be about vampire pictures, that they'd be just distorting enough to fool facial recognition software), Boss, Mean Mr. Mustard, Julie Mousehammer, Flat Chili Monica, and Dan.

Software Links VI (and other articles of interest)

• Refactoring Javascript with kratko.js - an interesting way to apply statistical analysis to your javascript refactoring.  You can try it on the page by using their simple bookmarklet on the page and the window object.
• 9 Tips on How To Improve Yourself as a Web Designer - read, write, talk, build.  It's surprising how few developers and designers actually follow that advice.
• 10 Tips to Boost Your HTML Forms Performance - label above the field and don't mask your password are particularly interesting.
• 5000 Free Math, Physics, And Engineering Video Tutorials And Lectures - Khan and MIT are the bulk of them, but these will be cool to share with Eryn.
• 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience - so many easy little javascript widgets for autocomplete, navigation, file trees, book widgets, and more.  Although I'm not I'll ever have a need for a robot on my web pages.
• Content Management Assessment Worksheet - I post this because I think the first three sections would be fun to ask any developer when doing their mid-year review and discussing their projects year-to-date.  "I'm going to go ask your stakeholders if they can give me an elevator pitch. Your review partially relies on their answer."  Unfortunately, I might have to mark down my own assessment in such a case, although anyone who had me as their stakeholder could be guaranteed I have a pitch of some sort.
• Jalapeño and beer brined pork chops - I really want to try them.  And as a bonus, you get to learn about "Pork Chop Theory".  "According to Dupree, if you cook one pork chop in a pan on high heat it will burn. But if you cook two pork chops in a pan, the chops will cook evenly as each chop’s fat will feed the other. As Willis has written, “It’s the ultimate in giving, sharing, and developing mutually beneficial partnerships and relationships. It’s not about competition, it’s about sharing the fat, sharing the love.”"
• Fit or Future, Which is More Important When Hiring? - my focus is usually future, although I better get the impression your piece doesn't fit because of the skill selection, not because of a lack of foundation knowledge.